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1.
Meet Scott Hanford Stossel, an accomplished man in his mid-40s with two young kids, a solid marriage, and a job as editor of a prestigious magazine. A graduate of Harvard, Stossel is popular among his friends and admired by colleagues. At the same time, and to a pathological degree, he is a man riddled with angst. And, for him, it has ever been thus.

Since he was two, Stossel recalls being a “twitchy bundle of phobias, fears, and neuroses.” He was a head-banging, tantrum-throwing toddler. On school days, his parents pried him, screaming bloody hell, out of the car and into the classroom. At age 10 he met the psychiatrist who would treat him for the next 25 years. Seventh grade brought a full-on melt down necessitating Thorazine. Over the years, he’s endured a Job-like onslaught of phobias including fears of vomiting and fainting, of flying, of heights, of germs, and, curiously, cheese.

Life for Scott Stossel has been a gauntlet of morbid what-ifs: what if I pass out, lose control of my bowels, bolt from the podium in the midst of a speech?

To keep such mayhem at bay, he’s medicated himself with bourbon, scotch, gin, and vodka. By prescription, he has taken Klonopin, Xanax, Ativan, Imipramine, Wellbutrin, Nardil, Thorazine, Zoloft, Effexor, Paxil, and Propranolol, among others. “A living repository of all the pharmacological trends in anxiety treatment of the last half century,” is how the author describes himself.

So Stossel enlisted his talent as a writer. “Maybe by tunneling into my anxiety for this book I can also tunnel out the other side,” he hopes. Did he make it? Not quite, “My anxiety remains as unhealed wound.” But while My Age of Anxiety has apparently fallen short of its intended therapeutic goals, it is — for the rest of us — a meticulously researched cultural and scientific biography of a mental affliction featuring the author as one very, very hard case.

2.
Illness memoirs satisfy two human imperatives. The first is voyeurism. Sick-lit, as it’s been called, incites a kind of literary rubber-necking. We’re drawn to tales of once-behaved cells ravaging organs, of accidents that crumple the bones, of strokes that lead us to mistake our spouses for headgear. In most of these stories, the author emerges scarred but wiser. Illness narratives also foster readers’ identification with the afflicted. This can be invaluable to people suffering from the same condition. They want to know they are not alone. They want to prepare for the worst, to cope in better ways, to learn more about their illness.

The illness memoir thrives on gory detail. My Age of Anxiety is no exception; Stossel even frets that he’s gone overboard. “I worry that the book, with its revelations of anxiety and struggle, will be a litany of Too Much Information, a violation of basic standards of decorum and restraint.” That’s understandable, but such intimacies are needed; they nourish the reader’s empathy for the sufferer. And when the malady happens to be unbounded anxiety — a syndrome of outsize reactions to threats that aren’t really there — we can learn a lot about the author: his vulnerabilities, the kinds of certainties he craves, and the morbid reaches of his imagination.

On the lighter side, anxiety can be funny. It is the stuff of frantic shtick, stand-up comedy, and Woody Allen. Depression, by contrast, makes darkness visible. It thrives on isolation and rumination; its muse is Ingmar Bergman. As for psychosis, it’s just too alien to be amusing.

Here is Andrew Solomon in Noonday Demon, his memoir cum biography of depression:
Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair.
Here is William Styron, author of Darkness Visible, his memoir of depression:
My brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.
Here is Stossel:
As is so often the case with irritable bowel syndrome, it was at precisely the moment I passed beyond Easily Accessible Bathroom Range that my clogged plumbing came unglued. Sprinting back to the house where I was staying, I was several times convinced that I would not make it and –teeth gritted, sweating voluminously — was reduced to evaluating various bushes and storage sheds along the way for their potential as ersatz outhouses. Imagining what might ensue if a Secret Service agent were to happen upon me crouched in the shrubbery lent a kind of panicked, otherworldly strength to my efforts at self-possession.
A Secret Service agent? Evidence of paranoia? No. This incident, it turns out, took place on the Hyannisport property of the Kennedy family. Over a decade ago, Stossel had spent time with the Kennedys as he researched a biography of Sargent Shriver. The episode continues, bordering on slapstick. When Stossel reached the bathroom, he “flung” himself onto the toilet (“my relief was extravagant,” he writes, “almost metaphysical”). Then all hell breaks loose. The toilet malfunctions, spewing sewage about the room and on his clothes. Our humble narrator strips, and, as he sprints to his room clad only in a bathroom towel tied at the waist, encounters JFK Jr. in the hallway. The latter is unfazed.

Stossel portrays his own ordeals with good humor, but he treats his family soberly. A. Chester Hanford, dean of students at Harvard College from 1927 to 1947 was always “nervous,” says Stossel, his great-grandson. The future dean told his young wife that he half-hoped to be drafted for combat during WWI as “dodging bullets on a battlefield would certainly be less wrenching than having to lecture undergraduates.” (Notably, as Stossel points out, anxious people are much better at handing fear — real threats — than they are at managing imaginary dangers; in fact, they often do a better of it than normal folks.)

When Dean Hanford turned 50, he cracked. The deaths of colleagues in World War II and the demise of his best friend weighed on him. Flagellated by self-doubt, given to fits of uncontrollable weeping, and, finally, suicidal, he entered McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass. Until his death almost 30 years later Hanford would undergo many hospitalizations. Other relatives bore the curse. Stossel’s mother, the granddaughter of the dean, was perpetually high strung; his sister has been treated with a range of anti-anxiety medications.

“Does my heredity doom me to a similar downhill spiral [as my great-grandfather] if I am subjected to too much stress?” Stossel wonders. And does it endanger his children? “For Maren and Nathaniel — May You Be Spared,” he writes in the dedication. Already, however, there are signs. His small son has serious separation-anxiety. His eight-year old daughter, like her father and grandmother before her, is saddled with an obsessive fear of vomiting. “Have I — despite my decades of therapy, my hard-won personal and scholarly knowledge of anxiety, my wife’s and my informed efforts at inoculating our children against it — bequeathed to Maren my disorder, as my mother bequeathed it to me?” the author asks. The answer resides in the nature of anxiety itself.

3.
Anxiety is the descendant of fear, our most primitive emotion. The arousal system instantly mobilizes organisms to defend against threat and, like any biological system, it can go awry. In so-called generalized anxiety disorder, a person exists in a chronic state of vigilance, ready to flee if need be. (Or, in the words of Freud, “Atrophied remnants of innate preparedness [as is] so well-developed in other animals.”) Individuals who suffer panic attacks feel as if they are suffocating. Presumably, specific neural mechanisms are hypersensitive and triggered by elevated but otherwise benign concentrations of carbon dioxide in the bloodstream (from situations such as rapid breathing or discomfort at being in a crowd) as pending asphyxiation.

Stossel suffered not only from these conditions but also from social phobia wherein a person is fearful of interacting with strangers lest he be rejected or humiliated by them. Some evolutionary theorists trace this glitch to the demands of hierarchical societies. That is, one had better be attuned to what others think of them or risk upsetting the social order of the tribe. As for the author, he suspects that that his social phobia has caused him to be a nice person. “[I]t may be that my anxiety lends me an inhibition and a social sensitivity that makes me more attuned to other people.”

Stossel’s own therapist dismissed the natural-functions-gone-wild hypothesis of clinical anxiety and put his money on existential crises as its engine. We grow old and die; lose loved ones; risk failure and humiliation; search unrequitedly for love and meaning. Anxiety is the shield we use to ward off the sadness and pain these inevitabilities bring, he tells Stossel. If he is right, the question then becomes why only some of us come undone in the face of these looming prospects.

For answers, Stossel is partial to the laboratory. He likes neuroscientists’ explanations of anxiety as excessive “neuronal firing rates in the amygdala and locus coeruleus.” The psychopharmacologists’ view of anxiety as the “inhibition of the glutamate system,” and geneticists’ errant “single-nucleotide polymorphisms” rightly strike him as “scientific and more convincing” than his therapist’s existential account. But they also raised questions:
Can my anxiety really be boiled down to how effectively gated my chloride ion channels are or to the speed of neuronal firing in my amygdala? Well, yes, at some level it can. Rates of neuronal firing in the amygdala correlate quite directly with the felt experience of anxiety. But to say that my anxiety is reducible to the ions in my amygdala is as limiting as saying that my personality or my soul is reducible to the molecules that make up my brain cells or to the genes that underwrote them.
“Shouldn’t this be liberating?” Stossel asks. “If being anxious is genetically encoded, a medical disease, and not a failure of character or will, how can we be blamed, shamed, or stigmatized for it? Eventually, he snapped out of this reductionistic reverie, reminding himself that “The same building blocks of nucleotides, genes, neurons, and neurotransmitters that make up my anxiety also make up my personality.” And his was a personality that accepted challenges, honored commitments, and excelled academically and professionally.

Finally, anxious habits can be learned. Here, the author’s mother taught a master class. This proper Mayflower descendant was chronically terrified of vomiting. Through her own doom-mongering and over-protectiveness, she inspired the author to spin out worst-case scenarios. Perhaps this is why Stossel holds such great store by the great Stoic Epictetus, who observed that “People are not disturbed by things but by the view they take of them.” From a young age, his mother taught him to take the dimmest possible one.

Though he treats her sympathetically — like his great grandfather, she is a tormented soul — he credits her with reducing him and his sister to “states of neurotic dependency.” His physician father, a depressive drinker, contributed the author’s boyhood shame (“You twerp, you pathetic little twerp”). Said a therapist from his adolescent days whom Stossel tracked down, “Your parents — an anxious, overprotective mother and emotionally absent father– were a classically anxiety-producing combination.”

So, what is anxiety? Stossel’s answer risks sounding evasive, but in the context of his rich book, is true and inevitable. It “is at once a function of biology and philosophy, body and mind, instinct and reason, personality and culture,” he concludes. “In computer terms, it’s both a hardware problem (I’m wired badly) and a software problem (I run faulty logic programs that make me think anxious thoughts).”

4.
In 2004, the World Health Organization conducted a mental health survey of 18 countries including the U.S., China, the Netherlands, and Italy. It found anxiety disorders to be the most common form of mental condition on earth. According to a 2009 report called “In the Face of Fear,” England’s Mental Health Foundation, anxiety has been detected at “record levels.” Does this mean that we really do live in an age of anxiety.

And if so, why? After all, ours is an age of unprecedented material prosperity and well-being in the industrialized West. Life expectancies are, for the most part, long and growing. On the other hand, progress, itself, may be the culprit. For all their glories, growth of the market economy, increases in geographic and class mobility, the spread of democratic values and freedoms, carry their own perils — namely, panoply of choices. Within bounds, we are relatively free to choose where we live, whom we marry, and what we aim to be.

Finally, we are now quicker to pathologize the vagaries of everyday life. And, in trigger-happy hands, the official psychiatric manual can be a set of diagnoses in search of patients.

It’s hard to know. “There is no magical anxiety meter that can transcend the cultural particularities of place and time to objectively measure levels of anxiety,” the author wisely observes. What we do know is that some relatively fixed proportion of humanity has always been more anxious than others. Authoritative voices, observers and sufferers both, attest to this. Hippocrates (anxiety as “worries exaggerated in fancy”), Robert Burton, author of the magisterial The Anatomy of Melancholy in 1621, Charles Darwin (for years was too agoraphobic to leave the house), Søren Kierkegaard (he dubbed anxiety the “terrible torture” of Grand Inquisitor), Thomas Jefferson (posthumously diagnosed as a social phobic), Sigmund Freud (observer), Virginia Woolf (sufferer), William James (observer and sufferer), Mahatma Gandhi (public speaking), Barbra Streisand (crippling stage fright), and, last but not least, Donny Osmond, spokesperson for the Anxiety and Depression Association of America.

A different conception of anxiety — more a cultural affliction than a clinical scourge — was forged in the post WWII period. In his 1947 epic book-length poem called The Age of Anxiety, W.H. Auden described man as “unattached as tumbleweeds,” on a quest to find substance and identity in an increasingly industrialized world. The poem inspired Leonard Bernstein to write a symphony and Jerome Robbins to produce a ballet. A year later, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. proclaimed Western man looks “upon our epoch as a time of troubles, an age of anxiety…our familiar ideas and institutions vanish as we reach for them, like shadows in the falling dusk.”

This existential angst, some historians suggests, embodied a consciousness that led to America’s tranquilizer culture. In 1955, Carter Products began marketing Miltown for nerves, tension, and, insomnia, but the company was pessimistic that psychiatrists would prescribe it. Freud was ascendant in American psychiatry at the time and theory dictated that treating specific symptoms was of little clinical value. Be it depression, anxiety, or psychosis — all clinical presentations were taken to be interchangeable markers of deeper psychodynamic misfortunes. Still, Miltown was somewhat safer than barbiturates (e.g., Seconal, Nembutal, and Amytal) currently in use. The latter were highly addictive, produced brutal withdrawal syndrome, and were lethal if a person accidentally took just one too many.

To the manufacturer’s great surprise, Miltown became the best-selling drug ever marketed in the country. It was the first lifestyle drug for the stressed-out, can-do corporate man and his put-upon spouse as well as for celebrities. The comedian Milton Berle, for example, introduced himself as “Miltown Berle.”

Researchers were excited too. Miltown (along with Thorazine, a novel anti-psychotic introduced in the U.S. in the mid-’50s) contributed to a wholesale transformation of the way we think about mental illness. It meant that mental illness was brought on by deranged brain biology, not by Oedipal dramas, and thus corrected with medicine.

Soon, though, there was trouble in paradise. By the late 1950s, Miltown, too, revealed itself to be habit-forming. As sales began to fall off, Valium-type drugs, a class of tranquilizer called benzodiazepines, rushed in to fill the vacuum. But, as before, chemical infatuation gave rise to disenchantment. In the mid seventies the FDA had amassed reports of benzodiazepine dependence and withdrawal. Prozac, too, once kicked off a revolution. But within a few years of its release in 1988, Prozac (which also gained FDA approval to treat panic disorder) lost its luster.

Now, the golden age of psychopharmaceuticals is drawing to a close. Most of the major drug firms have curtailed or shuttered their drug discovery labs. The pipeline to the FDA is running dry. Despite this depressing picture, psychiatrists are optimistic that new approaches will eventually prove fruitful — the question is how soon.

In the meantime, current medications — which continue to be prescribed in record volumes — are often extremely helpful. Psychological and behavioral therapies are indispensible too. Some patients do very well and even the author found some relief, but not nearly enough.

And what of the writing cure? “[I]n finishing this book, albeit a book that dwells at great length on my helplessness and inefficacy, maybe I am demonstrating a form of efficacy, perseverance, productivity — and yes, resilience,” Stossel writes. Indeed, he’s done all those things and more. He’s produced an excellent synthesis of reportage, research, and personal revelation. We are the beneficiaries of his self-imposed therapy. But the patient-author still ails, not being able, he says, to “escape my anxiety or be cured of it.”

Yet with a condition so encompassing and of such long standing, could he ever strip the “real” him from his disease? From the beginning, fear and Stossel were born twins. One wonders if he would ache for that phantom creature if, somehow, it were excised.

This year the books I liked best fell into two categories: the ones I read in a rush, squeezing in pages every spare moment or staying up late to finish them; and the ones I read slowly over several months, so that the books became my faithful companions. I tend to read three or four books at a time and this year what often happened is that one book would reveal itself to be a tortoise, and would live on my nightstand for weeks, while the hares (and whatever animal is between a hare and a tortoise — a cat?) raced by. As someone who gravitates toward “slow” books and movies, my sympathies lie with the tortoises, but I have to admit it was exciting to come across so many books that I couldn’t put down.

Of those hares, the one that still haunts me is Schroder. (And I have to thank Kathryn Schulz, whose in-depth rave made me pick it up.) It’s a novel about a divorced father, Eric Schroder, who is so frustrated with his custody arrangements that he kidnaps his daughter, taking her on a road trip through New England. Halfway through the book I felt I had been kidnapped, too, in the way that I was won over by a narrator I didn’t completely trust.

My tortoise reads included Dear Life, by Alice Munro; Far From The Tree and The Noonday Demon, both by Andrew Solomon; and Independence Day, by Richard Ford. I am actually still reading Independence Day, and I have been reading it since September. It’s the second novel in Ford’s Frank Bascombe trilogy, after The Sportswriter, but you don’t need to have read The Sportswriter to enjoy it. (Or at least, I didn’t.) Like Schroder, Independence Day is narrated by a divorced father, concerns a road trip between a father and his child (although without the kidnapping), and takes place over just a few days. It feels a little funny to spend several months with it. A week passes by in my life, while just a few hours go by in Frank Bascombe’s. But I love the way Ford stretches time in this novel, reveling in moments of happenstance, overheard conversations, and local landscapes. Here’s the view from Frank Bascombe’s windshield in upstate New York:
“A sign by a turnout announces we have now entered the Central Leatherstocking Area and just beyond, as if on cue, the great corrugated glacial trough widens out for miles to the southwest as the highway climbs, and the butt ends of the Catskills cast swart afternoon shadows onto lower hills dotted by pocket quarries, tiny hamlets and pristine farmstead with wind machines whirring to undetectable windows…In my official view, absolutely nothing should be missed from here on, geography offering a natural corroboration to Emerson’s view that power resides in moments of transition…”Finally, I have to mention the children’s book Ox-Cart Man, by Donald Hall, which I guess would fall in the tortoise category, since I’ve read to my one-year-old son at least twice a day for the past six months. It’s a simple story about a 19th-century farmer who travels from his small homestead to Portsmouth, N.H., where he can sell his harvest, his ox, and his cart at the market. My son loves it because it is full of lists and repetition. I love it because the language is plain and elegant and perfectly matched to the story. It’s so elegant, in fact, that I thought it would make a beautiful poem, and in a moment of procrastination I discovered that there is indeed a poem, “Ox Cart Man”, (by Donald Hall), which you can read in the Poetry Foundation’s archives. Now that I think of it, Ox-Cart Man is yet another book about a New England road trip, so perhaps that’s the true theme of my year in reading. Maybe I should close out the year with On The Road and head into the New Year looking west.

1.Most readers know Andrew Solomon as a non-fiction writer, but earlier this month, Scribner re-issued his debut novel, A Stone Boat. First published in 1994, it received excellent reviews and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction prize. Solomon was only 30, and the success of A Stone Boat might have pointed toward a career as a novelist. But, as Solomon documents in his subsequent non-fiction book, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, the publication of A Stone Boat corresponded with a debilitating episode of depression, one that took him years to recover from, and ultimately led him to write the 576-page examination of depression from personal, historical, scientific, and philosophical perspectives.

Ten years later, in 2012, Solomon published Far From The Tree, which chronicles the difficulties and joys of parents raising children with “horizontal identities”, that is, children whose identities are not directly (vertically) related to their parents’. These are the parents of prodigies, the parents of dwarves, of the deaf, the disabled, and the criminal, to name just a few. It’s a book of unusual vision and compassion and, like The Noonday Demon, entailed a monumental amount of research.

I mention these books because they were what led me to Solomon’s novel. I read both this spring, starting with Far From The Tree, and was struck by their deeply personal tone. His non-fiction is so narrative, with large swaths of memoir, and also, so literary, with allusions to myth and literature, that I wondered what more—or less—his fiction could possibly offer. I was also curious about A Stone Boat because Solomon refers to it throughout The Noonday Demon, (although not by name), as it relates to his own struggles with depression:

I have supposed that my first breakdown was tied to the publication of a novel that alluded to my mother’s illness and death; but it was also a book with explicit gay content, and surely that too was implicated in the breakdown. Perhaps, indeed, that was the dominant anguish: forcing myself to make public what I had so long immured in silence.

Even without Solomon’s interpretation, the autobiographical elements of A Stone Boat are fairly obvious. It’s set in Manhattan, where Solomon himself is from, and is narrated by a young concert pianist, Harry, whose mother is dying. The novel focuses on the relationship between Harry and his mother, one that is complicated first by Harry’s emerging gay identity, and then by his mother’s cancer diagnosis. On its most basic level, A Stone Boat is about clinging to love in the face of death, but on a deeper level, and especially in light of Solomon’s subsequent books, it’s a story about illness and identity, and how families cope when reality intrudes on their ideals. In the face of cancer, Harry and his mother cling to their simple love and their simple identities: the adored, dutiful son and the adoring, commanding mother. But cancer treatments undermine Harry’s mother’s authority, not to mention her beauty and vitality; and Harry cannot feel altogether adored or dutiful, knowing that his mother disapproves of, or at least, misunderstands, his sexual identity.

The plot of A Stone Boat, insofar as there is one, is about how Harry and his mother learn to love each other anew, amid their newly complex circumstances. This is a drama that plays out again and again in Far From The Tree, as families who were expecting to love their children in the ordinary, easy way that all parents love their children, must instead learn to love a child whose personality, capacities, and identity are radically different from their own. Our culture has a fantasy that love is easy, that it flows naturally from the soul, but as Solomon observes in a line that comes from Far From The Tree but could have come from any of his books: “Love is not only an intuition but also a skill.”

2.
A Stone Boat is a portrait of Solomon’s mother, as well a portrait of the world his mother occupied. It’s a fortunate place, with frequent trips to Europe, chauffeured cars, summer homes, and elaborate rituals and routines. The mother in A Stone Boat insists on cut flowers, drinks her sparkling water from stemmed glasses, takes afternoon baths, and has definite opinions on how her Harry should play various composers. When she is hospitalized, her husband has the means to join the hospital’s board, therefore insuring that she is housed in a magnificent room with water views, a room large enough to a host a party. Out of context, these details might sound overly privileged, even superficial, but for me, they were among one of the most moving aspects of A Stone Boat, and what separated it most from Solomon’s non-fiction, which is not especially visual. A Stone Boat revels in the material world, with paragraphs devoted to clothing, flowers, furnishings, buildings, cities, and bodies. We all grow up in the worlds our parents create, and Solomon fictionalizes his mother’s with care and admiration. “Living beautifully is not so hard,” Harry’s mother says, in her final weeks, knowing full well that her beautiful way of life, with all its daily comforts, is about to slip away with her. In a poignant gesture, she redecorates the apartment during her final year, so that everything will remain fresh and clean-looking for years after her departure.

While his mother prepares for death, Harry prepares for grief by breaking up with his long-time boyfriend and embarking on short-term love affairs that are sure to end in heartbreak. In a conversation with a new lover, Harry quotes a theory of beauty that posits that the experience of the sublime consists of trading easy pleasures for difficult ones. It’s an idea that comes up throughout the novel and which reaches its apex in the novel’s final pages, as Harry recalls a childhood memory suffused with pleasure and love for his mother—the easy love of a childhood. His realization, that adult life consists of trading this kind of childish admiration for a more considered, nuanced love, is his mother’s ultimate life lesson.

Harry’s mother also gives a compelling lesson in dying. During her treatments, she announces her desire to kill herself humanely if necessary. When that day comes, Harry finds himself witnessing a death scene “as grand and rich, as well-conceived and as stunning as La Traviata’s”. Given Solomon’s extensive writing on the subject, I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by revealing this plot element. In The Noonday Demon, Solomon describes his mother’s suicide as “the cataclysm of my life” and devotes a portion of that book’s chapter on suicide to his mother’s assisted death. (In fact, there are passages in that chapter that echo the novel, almost verbatim.) More recently, on the occasion of Dr. Kevorkian’s death, Solomon wrote in The New Yorker about the right to die peacefully, citing his mother’s own decision “to die at home, with us beside her, under what she held to be optimal conditions.” But he also describes his confused response to her decision: “When I first wrote about my mother’s death, I papered over my ambivalence by cheering for what she did, and recovering from that uncertainty is a slow process, but I draw closer to it every day.”

You feel some of that hidden ambivalence in A Stone Boat, which describes the scene of the mother’s death in fascinating detail but was oddly not as riveting as the non-fiction rendering in The Noonday Demon. I read The Noonday Demon before A Stone Boat, so it’s possible that the specifics were simply not as fresh the second time around. But when you read about Solomon’s mother in The Noonday Demon, it’s with the knowledge that the author has devoted years of his life to the research of suicide. To borrow an idea from a recent interview with Jonathan Franzen, you are drawn in knowing that the author has some “skin in the game”. Some of that urgency is missing in the death scene that ends A Stone Boat; Harry is in awe of his mother’s decision, and he conveys the moment of her death with reverence; but he is also rather dazed, and incapable of much interpretation. In a strange way, the fictional version feels more reported than the non-fiction one. Solomon even acknowledges this reported feeling, by describing how Harry, in the hours after his mother’s death, grabs a piece of paper to write everything down.

3.
Reading A Stone Boat so closely after reading Solomon’s non-fiction got me thinking a lot about the line between non-fiction and fiction, and in particular autobiographical fiction and memoir. It was interesting to observe the way Solomon wrote about his mother in his different capacities as memoirist, novelist, and reporter. But ultimately, the genre he chose didn’t seem to matter as much as the amount of time that passed between the publications of each book.

In A Stone Boat, which Solomon wrote just a few years after his mother’s death, Harry’s mother is a lively, authoritative, powerful character—so powerful that her elegant sensibility seems to infect the prose, which is more ornate and formal than in Solomon’s non-fiction writing. In The Noonday Demon, Solomon’s mother is a ghostly presence; her life and death feel unresolved, especially as Solomon describes his own experience with depression. (Interestingly, Solomon cites Hamlet, a character profoundly haunted by the ghost of a parent, as a character who changed the world’s understanding of depression.) Finally, in Far From The Tree, Solomon’s mother is portrayed in her full complexity. The book begins with an extended personal essay called “Son”, about growing up as a gay son born to straight parents. It’s a graceful, compassionate piece of writing, one that reveals Solomon’s mother as a kind, flawed, and charming woman, someone who loved her family imperfectly, as we all do.

The seeds of “Son” are there in A Stone Boat, especially in its final pages, as Harry struggles to grasp his mother’s legacy. You can also feel the stirrings of A Noonday Demon; Harry flirts with depression throughout the novel, worrying his mother and his friends. But even without Solomon’s evolution as a writer in mind, A Stone Boat is a small, elegant novel that asks a big, thorny question: how do we love unconditionally, but not blindly? It’s a question worthy of any genre, not to mention a career.